Happy Christmas, and CAT AND MOUSE

IMG_20151225_163835Christmas Greetings from my house to yours!

If you’d like a bit of a different seasonal read, give Cat and Mouse a try. A fair chunk of it takes place in winter – there`s lots of snow to be had, and even [teeny tiny spoiler] a Winter Solstice Feast!

Here`s an excerpt from the scene when it first starts snowing:

By the time they were finished supper, the snow was already three inches deep, and the wind was picking up. Cat could hear the snowflakes hissing as they hit the inside of the chimney pipe.

“Ooh, cosy,” she said with a comfortable little shiver. “Nothing like a good warm fire on a cold evening! Is there going to be lots of snow, do you think?”

“Probably,” Guy said, “it’s usual this time of year. Only four more weeks to Solstice. There’s been years where I barely made it through the snow to get to the Solstice Feast.”

“Oh, yeah, the Feast! Is that like the Equinox Feast that we had in town in September?”

Guy laughed. “No, not quite–it’s about ten times as big. The hall is usually filled to overflowing. The Solstice Feasts are the biggest ones of the year; all of Ruph and the surrounding areas comes decked out in finery. Which reminds me, I need to look out my feast clothing; the mice had better not have got into it.”

“Feast clothing? You mean everyone dresses up? But,” Cat’s eyes were wide, “I don’t have anything to wear!” Then she laughed. “Listen to me! I don’t have anything to wear,” she repeated in a high-pitched, affected voice, wringing her hands theatrically and fluttering her eyelashes. “Oh deary me, whatever shall I do?”

Guy grinned. “I’m sure we can find something,” he said.

[…]

A sudden wind blast rattled the outside of the cottage, and howled around the corners.

“Whoa!” said Cat, “that was a big one! I’ve never actually heard wind whistling around a house before, I only read about it, but this one sure does whistle. What’s it looking like out there?” She went to peer out through the window. “I can’t even see anything out there, it’s blowing so much!” She stepped over to the cottage door, unlatched the hook, and pulled open the door a few inches. “Oy!” she called out, having to suddenly lean hard against the door as snow blew in through the crack. “That’s a humdinger of a storm, and it wants to come in!” The snow was whirling hard past the door, Cat could barely make out the trees on the other side of the clearing. Then Guy was behind her, helping her push the door shut, and latched it again. Cat brushed at the snow on the floor with her foot. “Is that an extra-bad storm, or is this normal?”

Not to give anything away, but aside from getting their fair share of snow, they sure know how to party in Ruph. Next to having a celebration myself, I love nothing so much as writing one for my characters. So if you haven’t read Cat and Mouse yet, go check it out!

And now I’m going back to munching goodies and drinking Glühwein (mulled wine), and I might just watch one of the movies I got for presents (Cinderella and Inside Out. Yup, kids’ movies. Your point is … ?).

Hope you have or had a lovely holiday season yourself, whatever festivity you celebrate! And if you don’t celebrate, poor you – I mean, umm, hope you had a great Bah Humbug Day, just the way you like it.

Life, the Universe, Christmas and Cat and Mouse. See you in the New Year!

From the Shadows … Here!

So I didn’t get CHECKMATE published before Christmas – but here’s the next best thing: My good friend E. L. Bates is putting out her SciFi novel FROM THE SHADOWS today! I love that book in so many ways – and I don’t just say that because Louise is my friend. This story made me laugh, cry, cheer, fall in love with the characters… It’s so very worth reading. Get yourself a copy!

News from the Writing Trenches, December Edition

IMG_20151210_194352So, you know how back in September, I said that I was hoping to get Checkmate published by at least Christmas? Uh, yeah. Not gonna happen. I’m sorry…

I don’t actually know what happened there. Where did October go? I mean, I must have done something during that month – other than cook Thanksgiving turkey, and wrap up the last bit of garden, and throw a book birthday party for Seventh Son, and stuff like that. It feels like I’ve been busy non-stop…

And then, of course, after that, NaNoWriMo hit with a vengeance, and I got off on a completely different track. Instead of hanging out with Cat and Guy and Bibby in Ruph, I was off in an as-of-yet-unnamed world, spending time with Lyulf and Kalyana (at least that’s what she’s called right now – that might change, still) and Little Nameless (he won’t talk, so they can’t find out his name) and Old Nameless (who also refuses to give his name), all in pursuit of the mysterious silver bracelet that glows, sometimes. Which was all great fun, but didn’t really help Checkmate along any.

IMG_20151210_194149So, I think I’m now at the point where I can slowly start breathing again, which does bode well for the progress of Checkmate and other writing projects. However, first I have to excavate my household from its NaNo-induced state of dire neglect, and play catch-up on the Christmas-preparations front. Not one cookie has been baked yet this season, barely any presents purchased (never mind hand-made), and as for Christmas cards – what Christmas cards? Ah well, I have two more weeks to do all that. TWO MORE WEEKS? Yikes, that’s not much time at all!

So you’ll excuse me if I sign off now.
Life, the Universe, and, umm, I dunno – where’s my to-do list? [rushes off frantically to check the state of the baking supplies in the cupboard…]

Cat Taffy and Other Randomness

IMG_20151201_121726Johnny melted on the old couch in front of the fire, and pulled himself out into a long string of kittycat taffy (honestly, he’s not dead, just stretched out on his back). What is it with cats and heat? Both of ours will curl up in the warmest spot they can find (or stretch out in it, as it were), and as they don’t really like each other very much, there’s frequently a bit of “Nya nya, I got the spot by the fire first!” going on. I tell them to cut out the bickering, but they don’t listen to me.

IMG_20151201_134831Steve has been feeling a bit neglected lately, what with me having my head in NaNoWriMo and all. And, oh, yeah, I won! Meaning I got my 50,000 words written. The story isn’t quite finished yet, but it won’t take a whole lot more. Anyway, so here’s Steve guarding my new dictionaries. The Canadian Oxford one is a humdinger of a tome – the nitpicker’s self-defense weapon: “You want to disagree with me about the spelling of ‘colour’? Well, take that, you ignorant!” [Whap, bang…]

And to wrap up today’s round-up of randomness, here’s the lovely NaNoWriMo poster I won at the kick-off meeting we had back at the end of October. IMG_20151023_092957 (1)Do you know that it’s really hard to write “wrap-up randomness” without either dropping the w from “wrap” or adding a spare one on “random”? I had that problem a lot with my NaNo novel. The phrase “the arm ring on his wrist” occurs in it a lot (far too often, in fact – I’ll have to take the machete to it when it comes to editing), and almost every time, I ended up typing “the arm wring”.

Enough drivelling for today (and that’s “drivelling” with two l’s, not one, thank you very much. I’ve got ten pounds worth of dictionaries to back up that point).

Life, the Universe, Cat Taffy and Other Randomness. Tell Steve to stop glaring at me.

Sleeping Beauty and the Spindle

Irish_spinning_wheelI found out all about spinning on the weekend. There was a Christmas crafts event in town, and a couple of ladies from the Spinners and Weavers Guild were doing a spinning demo. Actually, that demo was the main reason I went to the event – spinning is one of the old crafts I haven’t actually tried my hand at, not properly, anyway, and I’ve wanted to know for a while how it works.

And sure enough, my suspicions were confirmed: every last “Sleeping Beauty” movie has got it wrong.

You know how the story goes: the wicked fairy curses the princess to prick her finger on a spindle on her 16th birthday. To try to prevent it, the king bans/burns all spinning tools. But of course, as he ought to have known, that does nothing; she finger-pricks anyway, falls asleep, a century later prince shows up, etc.

So how does that look in the movies? Huge conflagration of spinning wheels, for the most part. Then the dimwitted (ahem – sorry) princess, in a trance, walks up to a wheel, which has a sharp thing sticking out of the top, goes and purposely jabs her finger on that sharp pointy thing, and on we go with the snoozing etc. etc.

Complete baloney. It’s pretty obvious the movie-makers have never seen a real spinning wheel in their lives. It’s mildly forgiveable in the film makers of the 1959 Disney movie, when research was a little more difficult to do; but in 2014, you’d think that the set designers of Maleficent could have done about ten seconds of googling, which would have told them that there are no sharp pointy things sticking out of spinning wheels. Spinners of the past would have been severely puzzled by those movie spinning wheels.

I can just picture it now. The scene: a Great 21st-Century Folklorist has been time-transported back to a 17th-century German Spinnstube (shpinn-shtoo-ba, spinning room), where the women of the village are gathered around the fire on a dark winter’s night with their spinning wheels. Folklorist rubs his hands – here’s his opportunity to tell the “Sleeping Beauty” story as he knows it, and really get it entrenched in the minds of these peasants. So there are Gretl, Liesl, Anna, Maria, Maria, and Anna Maria, all sitting in a circle, their spinning wheels humming. [No! Turn off those lights! The only illumination we have are the fire and a couple of rush lights. It’s dark, folks. Got that image in your mind now? Okay, good. Carry on.]

Folklorist: “…and on her 16th birthday, she shall prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel!”
Maria 1: “On what?”
Maria 2: “Maybe she had a poor-quality wheel; the wood might have been splintered.”
Gretl: “Oh, you mean she pricked her finger on a splinter?”
Folklorist: “No! She pricked it on a spindle! You know, that pointy thing!”
Liesl: “What pointy thing?”
Folklorist: “Well, that – um…”
Anna: “This makes no sense at all. If the bad fairy wanted the  princess to kill herself with a spinning wheel, she’d have to find a better curse than that.”
Maria 2: “Yes; if she hasn’t got a splintered wheel. What about…”
[SCENE FADE OUT. FADE BACK IN. THE FIRE HAS BURNED DOWN A LOT, INDICATING THAT SOME TIME HAS PASSED.]
Anna Maria: “That makes more sense. I mean, who would believe anything so silly as someone pricking her finger on a spindle on a wheel? All right, Mr Storyteller, carry on, please!”
Folklorist, extremely reluctantly: “…so the wicked witch cast her curse. ‘On her 16th birthday,’ she said, ‘the princess shall club herself to death with the drive wheel of a spinning wheel…'”
The women: “Yes!” “That’s better!” “Now it makes sense.” “That’s so exciting!” “What happened next?”
[THE FOLKLORIST TURNS AWAY FROM THE WOMEN, SOBBING QUIETLY TO HIMSELF. FADE OUT.]

Anyway, that’s a more likely scenario than this poke-yourself-on-a-spinning-wheel one. Sorry, Mr. Disney.

The device that Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on is, in fact, a hand spindle – and not a drop spindle, either, which might serve to poke out your eye or be used to inflict classic blunt-force head injuries, but isn’t really  pointy. It seems that the most likely device for inducing century-long royal hypersomnia was what spinners call a Russian spindle, which is very pointy indeed. I’d love to learn how to use one sometime (for making yarn, not putting teen girls to sleep), but I wouldn’t sneeze at getting the hang of a spinning wheel, either.

Life, the Universe, and Tales of a Spindle. Or should that be Spinster?

The Wetzlar Cathedral

Wetzlarer Dom (2)I don’t recall having ever been inside of those before: a Simultankirche, or Simultaneum. But I got to see one this summer, on our trip to Germany. You might recall my pictures of Wetzlar, the Goethe-town? Wetzlar not only has beautiful half-timbered houses and the sentimental association with Goethe’s Lotte, it has the Dom, or Cathedral, one of the earliest Simultankirchen.

Wetzlarer Dom (4)
The Protestant altar in front, Catholic in back.

So what’s the big deal about those? You see, they’re ecumenical churches. Almost right from the start of the Catholic–Protestant split in Germany, since 1544 (Martin Luther was still alive), the Dom in Wetzlar has been used by both denominations. That’s right – unlike in so many other churches, the conversion of the townspeople to the Protestant form of Christianity did not mean that the Catholic believers were evicted. The rift between the denominations that has gone so very deep in so many places is, in this church, only evident by the fact that there are two altars – and up until 70 years ago, there were two organs, one in each end of the church, one for the Catholic congregation and one for the Lutherans. They simply take turns having their service.

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Early 14th century fresco

The Dom in Wetzlar is ancient. The first church on that site was built in the late ninth century, but construction on the cathedral as it stands today was first begun in 1230. There is still clear evidence of the medieval building – wall frescoes from the early 14th century, a Pietà from around 1370, a late-Gothic statue of Mary with angels that are mounted on something rather like a chandelier (with no candles). It’s an impressive building, a centre of spirituality that has been a place of worship for Christians of either flavour for more than a millennium.

Wetzlarer Dom (7)
The Pietà, ca. 1370/80

But why am I telling you about this today? Because it’s Remembrance Day. And one of the things that struck me quite forcibly when we visited the Wetzlarer Dom is what senseless destruction is wrought by war.

On March 8, 1945, Allied bombers flew over Wetzlar, and a hail of missiles struck the cathedral. The choir, the famous rood screen, the high altar, both organs, and all the stained glass windows were reduced to rubble.

Wetzlarer Dom (5)
March 1945

The Dom is not just a building – it is a house of worship, a gathering place of the people, a symbol of unity despite differences. Seventy years ago, it was destroyed in the course of the horrific violence that is war.

The Wetzlar Cathedral was rebuilt. There are once again two altars; but the organ is now shared by both congregations – and the rood screen, which once separated the spaces of Catholics and Protestants, was never reinstalled. The pews in the choir, that very part of the church that was a sea of rubble after the bombs fell, are reversible, so that the congregation can face the altar of their choosing – Catholic in the apse, Protestant in the crossing.

Wetzlarer Dom (1)

The Dom is once again a symbol of unity, of ecumenical faith. But it is also a reminder of the devastation brought about by war. It’s been seventy years, but the scars will always remain. They are an indelible part of the millennium-long history of this amazing place.

Lest we forget.